Protest und Rechtsstreit

How are political and legal actions interrelated? The author explores this topic empirically, looking at conflicts over Basic Security Benefits for Jobseekers (SGB II/“Hartz IV”). Via qualitative interviews with claimants, unemployed people’s action groups and unions’ legal service offices, the connections between individual legal action and collective, especially political forms of action of recipients are examined. The findings about social law in action – which has rarely been analysed – show the impact of the German Social law courts as a separate system of courts. The conclusion that the SGB II in action has been experienced as useful by different types of claimants – calmly contributing, anxiously contributing, calmly delegating, anxiously delegating – and that it has sustained the political conflict over Hartz IV challenges theoretical critiques of law with their focus on bourgeois law that treats individuals formally equal.